Net::OAI::Harvester ------------------- Net::OAI::Harvester is a Perl library for interacting with OAI-PMH repositories. OAI-PMH stands for Open Archives Intitiatve Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. More about OAI-PMH can be found at http://www.openarchives.org. INSTALLATION You *must* be connected to the Internet to run the test suite. Either: perl Build.PL Build Build test Build install Or: perl Makefile.PL make make test make install DEPENDENCIES OAI-PMH is essentially XML over HTTP so rather than reinvent the wheel there are a few dependencies. LWP::UserAgent - for HTTP XML::SAX - for XML parsing URI - for url representation Storable - for object serialization You also probably should be using Perl 5.8.0 at least since many repositories contain UTF8 data. TROUBLESHOOTING See the Changes document for a description of a potentially breaking change in custom handler operation introduced in version 1.20. The test suite recognizes the environment variable NOH_ParserPackage to force usage of an specific parser: NOH_ParserPackage=XML::SAX::PurePerl ./Build test This is to work around cases where the file ParserDetails.ini of XML::SAX::ParserFactory is not (yet) set up properly and the expected automatic fallback to XML::SAX::PurePerl somehow fails. -- It is crucial to have version 1.04 of XML::SAX::Base. This version is installed along with the XML-SAX package which is contained in the "vendor" tree of the perl libraries on many systems. On CPAN there also exists a separate module XML::SAX::Base with version 1.02 only which is not sufficient and - if installed - typically resides in the "site_perl" branch of the libraries, thus taking precedence over the newer version. Please make sure to uninstall/remove version 1.02 of XML::SAX::Base when you encounter it in your installation. COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE This software is free software and may be distributed under the same terms as Perl itself. Copyright (C) 2003 Ed Summers